Close quarters

by Victor Milán

  The Wasp cut its jump jets and landed feet first on the other 'Mech's head. "It ain't the meat," Cowboy said, "it's the motion."

  The Phoenix Hawk rose straight up on its own back-mounted jump jets, not quite so flash a maneuver as Cowboy's, but enough to get it back on its feet. Its right fist lashed out and caught Yellowjacket in the face.

  It was Cowboy's turn to be stunned by a blow, his 'Mech staggering back under it. The backs of its legs fetched up against the wrecked Raven.

  As Mayne lunged for him, Cowboy jumped straight up, soaring with the full force of his jump jets.

  Face to face they rose, straight up, rising high among bronze towers. The Wasp kept striking down at the PH with its fist while Mayne got his machine's remaining arm around the smaller 'Mech's waist and snugged his head against its hips.

  As the two 'Mechs reached the apex of their vertical jump, they began to fall back to earth, both pilots continuing to wrestle while braking their fall with pulses of their jets.

  It was an inherently unstable system. Fifty meters above the street the writhing machines fell off the thrust-columns of their jets. At that point they had the glide characteristics of, say, a dropped anvil.

  Fortunately, they did not fall the whole fifty meters back to the street. There was a four-story brick building under them to cushion their fall.

  More or less.

  * * *

  "What do you mean you're taking my ride?" Lieutenant JG Alberto Jaramillo demanded. His voice echoed off the tiles of the deserted Tubeway station, which had been scrubbed clean of most of the bloodstains from the Word of Blake raid.

  "Just that, Berto," Gavilan Camacho said. "I'm commandeering your 'Mech." It wasn't something anybody in the Regiment would exactly have predicted. The younger Camacho was known to aspire to bigger 'Mechs than his Shadow Hawk—whose weapons systems could not be repaired in time to get him back in the fight, no matter how loud the young Force Commander yelled at Zuma, Astro Zombie, or Chief Armorer Bogdan Michael "Stacks" Stachiewski. Yet here he was pulling rank to get into the cockpit of a Scorpion. Not only was the 'Mech the same weight as Red-tailed Hawk, it was also the least popular 'Mech in the outfit.

  With the help of Abdulsattah's people—and even more, well in advance of the fact, from Uncle Chandy and his designers—the Seventeenth was preparing one final surprise for the Ghosts.

  Though the gate was burned through, no Ghost 'Mechs had forced an entry. It was, of course, only a matter of time. Once they got inside, they would still face a bitter fight in the city-in-miniature that was the Compound, but they would have grabbed that much more of the initiative.

  In planning his stronghold Chandrasekhar Kurita had considered that one day he might wish to have a way of getting 'Mechs in or out of the Compound without their being seen, Secretly, the underground Tubeway station had been roofed with a movable cement slab. Slid back it revealed a BattleMech-sized opening into a tunnel large enough to allow 'Mechs passage if they could keep low enough. Of course, the only ones able to do that were in the 30-ton and lighter class.

  With one exception. The 55-ton Scorpion was one of the few four-legged BattleMech designs ever built. It was ugly as sin and had a horrible, kidney-jarring, single-footed gait like a mule. But it mounted a highly respectable Magna Firestar extended-range PPC. And most important, it was low-slung enough to pass through the Tubeway tunnel under the Compound.

  It was an obvious choice to lend some muscle to the twelve light 'Mechs from Second and Third Battalions asassigned to exfiltrate through the Tubeway and jump the Ghosts from the rear.

  "But I'm supposed to lead the attack!" Jaramillo complained. An edge of whine crept into his voice, for which it was hard to blame him. It wasn't often that Lieutenants Junior Grade got to command a company.

  "Not any more," Gavilan Camacho said.

  * * *

  "Go easy there, big fella," Cowboy Payson said as Buntaro Mayne hauled him from the wreckage of his Wasp. "I think my leg's busted."

  The Ghost captain dragged the mercenary against a still-standing wall. The two BattleMechs lay entwined in a giant mound of rubble at street level, the fight obviously over for both.

  Cowboy shifted his butt, trying to get comfortable. From the pallor of his face and the way sweat glued lank hair to his forehead, it was obvious he was in pain.

  He looked at Mayne, who seemed to be uninjured, except that his good eye was blacked. "I'm not gonna have to hurt you, am I?" the mercenary asked.

  Mayne laughed. "If I was a DCMS regular, honor would require me to kill you, no matter what shape we were in. Fortunately, I'm nothing but a low-down yakuza."

  He sat heavily down. "And to tell you the truth, I feel like I've done enough for one day."

  Cowboy was staring at a mound of rubble that did not quite conceal an elaborate musicbox.

  "Say," he said, "do you realize where we are?"

  The Ghost shook his head.

  "Son, we went and fell through the roof of the old Permissible Repose."

  Mayne was studying something he had pulled from the rubble: a little blue figure of Krishna playing his flute. "So we did."

  "You know what that means?"

  The one-eyed yakuza nodded. "It means," he said gravely, "that the drinks are on the house."

  38

  Masamori, Hachiman

  Galedon District, Draconis Combine

  2 November 3056

  Two ISF commandos stood flanking the main doors of the Coordinator's Rest Hotel. As usual, they had straight-bladed ninjato swords strapped point-down across their backs, and held unslung Shimatsu 42s in patrol position, diagonally before their waists. In a little noodle shop across the street, Cassie and three members of her squad crouched behind the counter, insulated black balaclavas pulled down over their faces.

  For all the fancy sensory gear built into the black suits, the DEST team were unlikely to spot the four unless actively looking for them. Cassie fervently hoped they'd given them no reason to do so.

  Besides, there was plenty of incentive to look elsewhere.

  The battle-clamor had died to a dull thunderstorm roar from somewhere behind them. The 'lleros were falling back into the Compound. That was all according to plan—as long as they had laid sufficient hurt on the Ghosts. From a few impressionistic glimpses, Cassie guessed the Seventeenth had inflicted a few more casualties than they'd suffered.

  In this bizarre battle, that was victory. But it was transient.

  The knowledge almost crushed her, that ultimately her MechWarrior comrades couldn't win. Only she could win; and if she failed, it would doom the Seventeenth to destruction no matter how they fared against their erstwhile friends of the Ninth Ghost Regiment. Because as long as Ninyu Kerai Indrahar and his father believed Uncle Chandy was a traitor to name and Combine, they would continue to hurl the Dragon's might against him in ever-larger doses, until the Caballeros drowned in a torrent of steel, fire, and blood.

  She glanced at her companions. They nodded, looking like photonegative raccoons in the gloom. She reached up and turned on the communicator sewn into a pouch on her vest. They had shut down their radios at a point perhaps half a klick from the uncompleted hotel, taking for granted that the ISF had sophisticated RDF gear inside that could detect sets that were turned on, even without their transmitting.

  Very soon now the Dracs would know the Scouts were there anyway. She broke squelch with her thumb, three clicks.

  Five heartbeats later the right-hand sentry flew backward through the plate glass window into the lobby.

  As with their sensors, there were tradeoffs to the environmentally sealed suits the DEST killers wore. Protection cost them flexibility, and like Cassie, the ISF agents opted for agility, wearing lightweight armor instead of bulky assault vests with steel-ceramic laminate inserts like the ones several of Cassie's team wore.

  Of course, not even an armored assault vest would withstand the impact of a Zeus sniper's round the size of Cassie's little finger travel
ing five times the speed of sound. The bullet went clean through the DEST commando and shattered the supposedly bulletproof glass—not transpex— behind him.

  The other sentry reacted just the way a DEST member would in the holos, dropping to one knee and bringing her Shimatsu up without an eyeblink's hesitation. Cassie, Elizondo, McTeague, and Absalom Sloat already had their machine pistols leveled over the counter.

  In the action holodramas people were always doing things like knocking out windows with the butts of their weapons before shooting. That always made Cassie crazy; if you could bust it out, why not just shoot it out and drop your target at the same time? As near as she could tell, it was generally done so that the heroes would have the sound of breaking glass to warn them, instead of starting to spring leaks before they knew anything was wrong. Just as movie ninja—DEST and traditional—always blew their whole game plan by uttering a chilling scream before attacking their victims from behind. Dumb.

  The noodle shop's window was not bulletproof. Supposedly that didn't matter; Uncle Chandy had provided bootleg 10-mm ammunition that would allegedly defeat most bulletproofing shy of actual armor plates. Not even DEST used such ammo, at least not within the Combine. For one thing, Combine citizens were not permitted body armor, and it also reduced the risk of the ISF operatives injuring each other in those embarrassing crossfire situations that so often developed in the heat of combat.

  The window blew out satisfactorily as the scouts opened up. The kneeling DEST agent went over backward without even getting off a shot. That might bode well for the effectiveness of the ammunition—but with flexible armor, a dozen close-range torso hits would almost certainly put you down from broken ribs, if nothing else, even if they didn't penetrate. But the hotel window broke on that side too, which was a positive sign.

  At the sound of shooting the rest of the commandos were supposed to switch on their radios. "Let's go," Cassie subvocalized into the mike-patch taped to her larynx. She vaulted the counter and ran for the street, the others close behind.

  * * *

  " 'Mechs! Josey Maria, they're coming out of the river!"

  Slowly and inexorably, the Dracs pushed into the Compound from the west. From Great White's cockpit Colonel Camacho was fading elements out of the fight at the south wall, where the assault was not being pressed as single-mindedly, and throwing them into the breach.

  He had not yet committed his own 'Mech to action. He wanted to choose his moment to die. Besides, despite the pain of knowing that his sons and daughters, the MechWarriors of the Seventeenth, were suffering and dying under culebra guns, he was rather having fun.

  The warning cry jolted him from command mode to combat mode. He kicked Great White into motion, moving around to the south side of the towering Citadel.

  As he rounded the corner, he saw them. A Trebuchet had already touched down inside the grounds. Other 'Mechs were descending from the clouds—like angels, he thought.

  He smiled inside his helmet. These manifestations were definitely on the wrong side to be angels. Lieutenant Teresa Chavez would rag him forever if she knew he was harboring such heretical thoughts.

  Across the river the snow fell heavily upon Sodegarami.

  In fact, snow was falling to all sides. But none fell upon the blazing heart of Masamori.

  It says much about our sins, Don Carlos thought, that God suffers His pure white snow to fall upon the Floating World, but not upon us.

  Slowly he walked his Mad Cat to meet the intruding 'Mechs. He understood too well what had happened. The Mirza's blue-jumpsuited security troopers were very good at what they did. But taking the brunt of a full-out assault by an entire veteran regiment of BattleMechs was not in their job descriptions. They had all gotten caught up watching the terrifying yet exhilarating display of Tai-sa Shimazu's forces gnawing their way to the heart of Hachiman Taro Compound, and had forgotten to keep an eye on the river.

  As the enemy 'Mechs landed, they winged out to both sides until they faced Great White in a rough semicircle.

  "Not too many captive Mad Cats in the Inner Sphere," boomed the Trebuchefs loudspeakers, "much less with that shark smile painted on the snout. Colonel Camacho, I presume."

  "Si. Whom have I the honor of addressing?"

  "Tai-i Hanson, of the Ninth Ghost Regiment." The Trebuchet gestured with its left hand. "I'm calling on you to surrender, Colonel. This game is over. I know you're riding a Mad Cat—which means you were man enough to take it from the Clans in the first place. And we're just little guys. But we're twelve to your one."

  Indeed, Don Carlos thought, and what a glorious song Zuma can make of my passing. He felt shamed, then, for not permitting the Chief Aztech to sing the song he had composed for Patsy. It was sheer pettiness, a last lingering hurt committed by an unworthy father. But Zuma was wise; he would know to sing Patsy's song at Don Carlos' funeral.

  If any of Caballeros survived. But what more fitting way for their Colonel to die than fending off this attack in the rear long enough for a counter to be mounted?

  "I regret," he said, "that I must decline your kind offer." Deliberately, so as to make his intentions abundantly clear— for he would die an honorable man, as he had tried to live as one—the Colonel raised the big PPCs that tipped either arm.

  A shadow passed over him. He looked up through the canopy's top panel to see the unmistakable form of his son's Shadow Hawk sailing overhead. Straight for the enemy company.

  "Gavilan, no!" he screamed. "You're unarmed!"

  Red-tailed Hawk touched down in front of him. It wobbled, then bent its legs and jumped at Hanson's BattleMech.

  The Ghosts opened fire. Sensing wounded prey, they ignored the Colonel's Mad Cat to concentrate on the airborne Shadow Hawk.

  Red-tail's armor was already shredded from the pounding it had taken in the streets of Murasaki. For one soul-tearing moment Don Carlos watched his son's machine hang against the clouds, crucified in fire.

  The next moment the 'Mech blew apart in midair. There was no parachute.

  "No!" Don Carlos screamed again. He tipped the Mad Cat forward into a run at its terrible, full OmniMech speed.

  He no longer intended to die. Indeed, his own survival or otherwise had become immaterial to him.

  His whole intention was to kill. His only remaining child had been slaughtered before his eyes.

  He would wash those eyes clean in Drac blood.

  * * *

  Lieutenant SG Teresa de Avila Chavez—la Guadalupana— died leading a charge into the flank of the salient the Ghosts had driven like a spear into the Compound's side. No fewer than five MechWarriors swore later that in the flames gushing upward from her Crusader they saw angels swooping to cover the stricken heroine with their wings and bear her bodily up to Heaven.

  * * *

  Muzzle flashes flickered inside the hotel, bright in the unlit lobby. At Cassie's side Sergeant Dix grunted but kept running as he took a body hit. From behind she heard a wail; another one of her people hadn't been so lucky.

  She had a grenade in hand, lobbed it underhand through a blown-in window. Then her whole squad went face down on the blacktop. An explosion, followed by tendrils of white smoke and screams.

  On their feet again, the squad charged, firing as they ran. The gunfire that took out the two sentries had solved one problem: how to get inside. Both the electric-eye door and the revolving door were surely locked. Cassie had feared that valuable seconds would be wasted blasting a way in with door-knocker charges—and she knew that every second she gave the black-clad Dracs within would pare down her already razor-thin chance of success.

  She leapt through into a hell of screaming, thrashing figures. Each seemed to be dusted with tiny stars.

  The only three kinds of hand grenades in common use among the warriors of the thirty-first century were fragmentation, stun, and nonlethal disabling gases, for only a suicidal zany would loose lethal agents like tear, nausea, or hallucination into air he might be forced to breath himself. T
he ISF's commando suits protected them against fragments and the dazzling flash and bang of stun bombs, and were sealed against aerosols as well.

  What Cassie used was a humble smoke grenade—or what was still by common courtesy called a smoke grenade more than a millennium after its introduction. White phosphorus was actually a pretty poor smoke round, tending to produce a forest of wispy spires of white smoke that seldom obscured much of anything.

  The real point to Willy Peter was what produced those smokes-spires: hundreds of tiny pieces of phosphorous that clung tenaciously to anything they touched, burning at 2400 degrees Centigrade. They could etch ferro-fibrous armor, and ate quite greedily through the black DEST body suits. Which, as the suddenly frantic operators found, were very hard to get out of in a hurry.

  Most of the hit team waiting to take down Chandrasekhar Kurita was assembled in a large auditorium and holotheater off the lobby of the Coordinator's Rest Hotel. The soundproofing was very effective; only the half-dozen nearest the exit heard anything when the sentries went down. A fact that proved most unlucky for them, because they were currently locked in an agonizing dance of death with phosphorus for a partner.

  Their gunfire, the grenade blast, and the ensuing screams alerted the rest. Black-clad forms were beginning to pour into the lobby as the Scouts stormed in.

  Yvonne Sanchez rushed past Cassie, holding a satchel charge to her chest with one hand, firing her machine pistol with the other. Her body protected by the bomb and her assault vest, she charged straight into the commando who stood in the auditorium door shooting at her. Blood sprayed from an arterial hit on her arm. She kept going.

  She hit the commandos like a running back, trying to bull her way through. Several dropped their Shimatsus to draw swords, slashing at her arms and face.

  The scouts were screaming at her to come back, hopping around as they tried to get a clear shot at her attackers without hitting her. Cassie just headed for the elevators. On this mission there was no time to deal with wounded. Poor Yvonne was dead.